Kimberly Treacy

How to Get Visitors to Read Your Website Content

Content creation is a process that requires a significant investment of resources. Because it takes a lot of work to produce quality content for the web, it’s important to get as much mileage as possible out of every post or page your Omaha business publishes. In order to accomplish that goal, it’s important to ensure that there aren’t any issues with your website design that are sending visitors away before they have a chance to see just how good the content is on your site.

Based on all the data that Big Red SEO has collected and analyzed, here are the most important things to address if you want to maximize the number of visitors who read your website content:

Content Creation Should Include Optimized Formatting

Whether it’s an article, landing page or blog post, a piece of online content needs to be optimized for the behavior of online users. Although a page may contain tons of valuable information, if it’s in the form of a wall of text, most visitors will feel overwhelmed and click the back button before reading it.

Countless eye-tracking studies have shown that people’s most common behavior online is to scan through a page and then decide if they’re interested in reading it. The prevalence of scanning is why it’s important to break up posts into fairly small paragraphs that are separated by subheadings. The same goes for including relevant images. By using this format with any content you produce, you’ll be able to keep a larger number of visitors around for longer.

Make Sure Your Site Loads Quickly

The most common reason that people leave a website without reading it or taking any other action is because it takes too long to load. Keep in mind that creating a site that loads fast doesn’t mean that the website design needs to be boring. Instead, it means the design process needs to be handled by professionals who can create an attractive design which is also optimized to load as fast as possible.

Over the last six to twelve months, you may have noticed an increase in the number of “lightbox pop-ups” that appear when you’re reading a blog post or similar piece of content. Some of these lightboxes not only have an initial pop-up, but also a secondary pop-up that appears when you close the first one.

Although some site owners swear that this is the best method they’ve found for growing their email list or accomplishing a similar goal, it’s easy to understand how this type of experience could cause a visitor to completely abandon a site. So before jumping on this bandwagon, there are two alternatives to consider that can get visitors to take action without causing them to abandon your site without reading its content.

The first option is to put an optimized call-to-action section at the end of your blog posts. Some businesses use a standard offer (like offering a free ebook in exchange for an email address) across all of their posts, while others customize this section for each individual post. The second option does involve using a lightbox pop-up. However, instead of interrupting someone while they’re reading, this element can be configured to only display when a visitor’s mouse moves away from the actual website. Additionally, this element can be limited to a single pop-up instead of back to back ones.

Keep in Mind That Visitors May Come on Small Screens

One aspect of content creation that’s changed significantly in recent years is acknowledging that not everyone who comes to a site to read a post is going to be looking at a laptop or desktop screen. Instead, both mobile and tablet usage have continued to steadily grow over the last few years. Even though phones and tablets have smaller screens, plenty of people like to use them for things like reading while on the go. In order to ensure people choose to read your content instead of leaving your site to go read somewhere else online, your content needs to look just as good on a small screen as it does a big one.

Get Professional Help from Big Red SEO: (402) 522-6468

Since there are a lot of obstacles that can get in the way of visitors being able to read all of your content, having professional help can be extremely useful. And if you’ve been meaning to make content creation a priority for your Omaha business but simply haven’t been able to find the time, Big Red SEO can take care of that task as well. Give us a call at (402) 522-6468 to talk about how we can help your Omaha get the most out of its online presence.

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